My Body Keeps the Wrong Receipts
A book of poems uses ordinary receipts to question what a body records, refunds or refuses after illness, with tenderness and occasional inconvenient laughter.
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How it begins
PROOF OF PURCHASE
My body keeps the receipt for a Tuesday I cannot remember buying.
Three hours of bright light. One plastic cup. The price of being told to relax.
At the bottom: THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT.
There are sentences a machine should be embarrassed to print.
RETURNS
The woman at the counter asks whether I have the original packaging.
I look down.
Same coat. Different weather inside it.
I would like to return the expectation that getting better means going back.
She scans the apples.
We agree on the apples.
They are difficult to make symbolic when somebody is waiting to pay.
MOTHER
Dina brings soup in a container she wants back.
This is her finest kindness: the assumption that there will be another ordinary visit.
She does not tell me I am strong.
She tells me the lid goes on the other way.
I turn it.
We sit until the soup is cool enough to stop being advice.
ITEM NOT RECOGNIZED
Some mornings the body rings up an old fear under a new number.
I do not argue with the cashier.
I put both feet on the floor.
The floor, which has never attended a seminar on resilience, holds them.
TOTAL
Today I walked to the shop and forgot why I had gone.
I bought a pear.
It was not a milestone. It was a pear.
Sweet at the center, hard near the stem, bruised where somebody had held it without enough attention.
I ate it over the sink.
For once I did not make a record of the date.
The small white receipt went into the bin.
Outside, the evening continued without asking whether I had earned it.
I opened the window and let some of it in.
On the way home, a dog leaned against my knee. No form requested. No evidence required. Only the brief weight of another living thing.
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Outline and characters
Develop this idea
Poetry about recovery needs room for contradiction. A receipt offers dates, prices and apparent certainty, which can press against a body's untidy experience without becoming a medical explanation. Let the speaker be funny, annoyed and uninterested in inspiration at times. Avoid presenting suffering as something that must produce wisdom. Your own sequence could use another everyday record, varying the forms so some poems add things up and others deliberately refuse the total.
- The opening poems use receipts to question proof of pain
- Shop transactions contrast with the body's uncertain memory
- A hospital sequence resists the demand for a tidy before and after
- Family poems distinguish care from explanation
- Humor interrupts the language of self-improvement
- The central poem refuses to refund a changed life
- Small walks produce pleasures that do not cancel grief
- The speaker discards some records and keeps others
- A meal shared without discussion of progress changes the book's rhythm
- The final receipt leaves room for a future not yet totaled
Characters
- Nessa Orr, 39. Speaker sorting the body's unreliable account after illness
- Dina Vale, 62. Mother whose practical care resists tidy explanations
Series possibilities
- A companion collection follows objects kept after the speaker stops needing proof of every difficult day.
